"How to Plug In a Supercomputer: Quantifying Power Consumption at Scale"

Power is becoming an increasingly important concern for large supercomputer centers. However, to date, there have been a dearth of studies of power usage 'in the wild' -- on production supercomputers running production workloads. In this talk, we present the initial results of an effort to characterize the power usage of three Top100 supercomputers at Los Alamos National Laboratory: Cielo, Roadrunner, and Luna (#18, #22, and #64, respectively, on the November 2012 Top500 list). Power measurements taken both at the switchboard level and within the compute racks are presented and discussed.

The talk is intended to appeal not only to those doing research in power- and energy-efficient computing but also to anyone who has ever wondered what it takes to turn megawatts into petaflops in a production supercomputing center.

Short Bio:

Scott Pakin has worked since 2002 as a Research Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His research interests include analyzing and improving the power and performance of high-performance computing systems. He has published papers on such topics as high-speed messaging layers, language design and implementation, job-scheduling algorithms, and resource-management systems. He received a B.S. in Mathematics/Computer Science with Research Honors from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001.